The salary for a dead person remained on
the budget for several years, a fact that has Lake St. Charles residents
wondering: What's up with our management company?

To find out, Lake St. Charles homeowners
John and Terri Bakas have filed public records requests with Rizzetta &
Co. Inc. to get financial information from the past three years.

So far, Rizzetta has resisted providing
the documentation.

Lake St. Charles, off U.S. 301 about 1
mile south of Progress Boulevard, is preparing its community development
district budget for the 2003-04 fiscal year. A final hearing is scheduled
for Aug. 18.

"The fact that we've had the salary of
a person who was deceased still being budgeted indicates there is a lack
of oversight of the budget process by the manager and the CDD board," John
Bakas said. Bakas said the company has provided budgets from the past three
years, but no record of how much money was actually spent.

In a letter dated June 24, William Rizzetta
told Terri Bakas that the company is not subject to the public records
law.

But the Lake St. Charles' CDD contract
with Rizzetta states that the company will "maintain the public records
of the District."

A community development district is a governmental
body with elected supervisors who are paid to serve on the board. The CDD
levies a special assessment that appears each year on a homeowner's tax
bill. Last year, about 700 Lake St. Charles homeowners paid $876 each.

About half of that money repays a bond
that funded the Lake St. Charles infrastructure, one-fourth goes to landscape
maintenance and the rest supports such items as community events, lighting,
security and district administration.

The CDD hired Rizzetta in 1996 to manage
the district, and Nicholas Staszko is the Rizzetta employee assigned to
Lake St. Charles. Rizzetta gets $21,000 a year to manage the CDD, Staszko
said.

Bakas said he became concerned with the
way the property is being managed in January. Then in June, residents learned
that the salary for a maintenance man who had been dead for several years
was included in early versions of the budget. The extra money, Staszko
said, has been put into reserves or used to fund other items.

Such sloppy accounting, Bakas said, doesn't
allow residents to know what it really costs to run the community.

The five-member CDD board has the power
to terminate the contract with Rizzetta, but it is happy with the company's
work.

"I've never had a problem with Rizzetta,"
board member Rhonda Ort said. "They've been very responsive to me."

The Bakases agreed that Staszko and the
board have responded to resident requests. When asked to reinstate sheriff's
patrols, they did so; when asked not to spend $8,000 on new playground
equipment, they complied.

But Bakas still wants more detailed information
on how money has been spent in the past.

Staszko said the documents provided and
two budget workshops in June were sufficient.

"Everyone who's had an interest in the
process has had an opportunity to be involved in it," he said.

But Bakas noted that the proposed budget
he received from Rizzetta is a two-page document that he had to pull teeth
to get. The north Tampa community of Westchase, on the other hand, posts
its 78-page financial report on the Internet. "It's clear that we're not
getting the quality of management that we're paying for," Bakas said.